


MEMOIRS OF A BACKGROUND MONSTER

by Cosplayplush



Category: BioShock 1 & 2 (Video Games), Dark Souls (Video Games), Diablo III, Fallout (Video Games)
Genre: Metafiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 12:19:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16810459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cosplayplush/pseuds/Cosplayplush
Summary: Ever wonder what goes through the mind of a generic low level monster when you return from the end of the game? Why the blasted out cave has lit candles and who is maintaining them? Enemies watching as their kind are dispatched and their bodies turn into boxes or little bags full of items? Horror in their minds when you survive a head shot with a single point of health.Meet Frank.





	MEMOIRS OF A BACKGROUND MONSTER

**Author's Note:**

> This is just some fun I had when I realized there was some weird laws in games and how everything must be so different on the other side of the playing. A sort of Wreck-it-Ralph logic but a bit less...colorful.

MEMOIRS OF A BACKGROUND MONSTER

You know, as a generic skeleton there is a great deal of work out there for us. Every game out there needs us to fill out the ranks. Hell, some of the bosses are skeletons themselves and hire us only. We come in and work the dungeons, castles, and marshes as adventurers come though. It's typically very simple, stop the adventurer from getting to the boss. That's usually how the contract reads. In the course of my life as a professional skeleton warrior I have come across some bizarre contracts. I suppose you think that we skeletons have an easy life. Let me shed some light on the stranger points of the job.

CANDLES-

I have a standing contract with the Diablo game title. Skeletons have always been in the game. Each of the acts come with us in some way or another. I'd like to focus on the main boss from the first act. Leoric, the Skeleton King. SKELETON KING. I took the contract without so much as reading the first page. Read the terms and conditions, kids. Read them.

First day. Me and several other skeletons show up to the cathedral dungeon. A dungeon under a cathedral, seem an odd place for a multi layered dungeon, but I wasn't there to judge. Anyhow, we come in and work is already underway. Long term employees are already coming out of graves, zombies are shuffling over, and some old quill beast milling around. Frankly, I was a bit miffed that the zombies and quill beast got a bit of an upgrade since I saw them last. To make matters even more strange for my buddies and I, was the new chick over with the zombies. Front all covered in some weird vomit, barely rotting and tattered clothes barely covering what needed to be covered. My first thought was that this Leoric was a bit of a lecher. To my shock she goes and throws up a stream and pulls a zombie from the nasty mess. A buddy of mine elbowed me and pointed out that our spot on the cooperate ladder just dropped a rung or two.

Eventually, we make it up to this Leoric. A giant hulking mass of armor with standard skeleton bones holding it all up. Bits of muscle and skin here and there. Again, I wasn't there to judge, I just wanted to work, get paid and go home to my Netflix. First thing this boss does is issue us a short sword and probably the most pitiful looking helmet and shield. We took them, better than nothing. He tells us to go man the dungeon levels. He didn't care wither we grouped together or wandered around looking for adventurers. Cool. Easy, open ended job. At least, that's what I thought.

So as I was about to head out with my buddies when I got grabbed by Leoric. He turns me around and shoves a stick with a small flame on the end of it, into my hands. This guy then orders me to go through out all the levels of the dungeons and make sure all the chandeliers, candelabras and random candles ARE LIT! ALL OF THEM! WHY?! He wanted the levels lit up, but as he put it 'not too much light. Just enough to be eerie'. That's it. He walked off and left me with this counter productive order to fill. Worst off, I can't argue against this. I signed my name on the dotted line and this was the big boss of this act that was giving me an order.

Right, the sooner this was done, the sooner I'd get away from the stupidity. I'm was working on the second level, managed to pull in some help from a zombie and a fellow skeleton. Standing on the zombie's shoulders to light the next chandelier may not have been my best plan, but at least it was flesh rather than bone. The chandelier was lit and I climbed down. The zombie made some weird gargling noise and starts shuffling ahead. The other skeleton and myself pick up our rinky-dinky sword and shield to follow to the next set of candles to light. That's when I heard them. A long way down the hall there was three different classes of adventures barreling toward a lone group of skeletons and zombies. My zombie and skeleton helper took off to go try to kill those guys. I was just left standing there with a tooth pick of a sword and a candle lighter. The adventurers tore through them, and for an obvious reason. There names and experience levels floated above their heads, along with full health bars. Blue experience numbers. Paragon points! Thirteen hundred something! What in all of creation was a heavily paragon-ed player doing there. In the first levels! Bad enough one, but there were three! My skeleton helper tired to swing but before he could even finish the wind up, he exploded. Frank was his name, good guy, mean poker player. The zombie at least got to touch one of them before he fell to pieces.

This all would have been fine by me, but these adventurers, for whatever reason, decided to turn and smash the nearby candles. They unchained a chandelier and let it fall on a group of skeletons and zombies. All my work, and these pricks come in, slaughter the staff and steal everything from every box they find. For some twisted pointless reason these guys have to smash the candles they find. I couldn't believe it. As if my neurotic boss was enough of a pain in my ass, now I have adventurers tearing up my work.

I waited for these guys to go past. I had to know if those candles were the only ones they put out. I re-lit a good portion of candles as I back tracked. I stopped halfway through the level when every single candle I came back to WAS SNUFFED! WHY?! It made no sense that they would go and smash every one. I don't think I ever screamed so loud in dead existence.

What I got from that job was nothing more than a distaste for Diablo adventurers and a burning hate for any and all candles.

PLAYER RESPAWN-

Ever heard of the game Fallout? I'm sure you have. Well we skeletons weren't exactly in the game, but we still were. We were handed flesh suits of rotting bodies and called ourselves ghouls. This was fine with me. That meant a bit more padding for when we got hit. Seems it had escaped me that Fallout was all about guns, not swords. Padding didn't do shit to stop anything. As a ghoul we were driven out to location for us to patrol. Standard gig, nothing flashy. By this time, I had sworn off dungeon games for a while. Later, came to find, no matter the game, we were little man on the totem pole.

Ghouls, not much talking, lots of shrieking and flailing around like a madman. The hard part about this job was the lack of weapons. Grating, but do-able. At the very least the claws were sharp.

I was leaning against a half destroyed radio tower when I saw the adventurer for this game. He was decked out in some weird assortment of armor and heavy looking helmet. How this guy wasn't suffering a constant heatstroke, I'll never be able to guess. That's aside the point. As I watched him talk to a NPC, I saw a giant gecko monster rush up behind him. This monster did what we all aspire to do, whacked the adventurers head clean off. I had moved to stand up straight and applaud the gecko. Apparently that wasn't going to happen. The world froze for a brief moment and I saw the adventurer vanish. Head and body just gone in a flash. I hadn't moved but the gecko was back where he came from. Then, here comes the exact same adventurer. The one who's head was bouncing across the sand but seconds ago. The guy turns toward the gecko that killed him and guns it down with a couple too perfectly placed shots. He goes and gets back to the NPC and has the same exact conversation with him again.

That was my first time I ever dealt with a respawn. I had always heard stories about it, just never had seen it. I never understood why every monster I spoke to about it said similar things. 'few things as annoying or insulting as a guy who doesn't stay dead and comes back knowing exactly who and where you are'. Still not sure, for me, which is worse. Senseless candle smashing or respawning at all.

LOOT-

My short job as a Splicer from the Bioshock was entertaining. Little nerve wrecking considering the job enviroment. Regardless, I did come back to work the second game. Again, skeletons weren't called for, but the great thing about being nothing more than bones, you can slip into any suit offered. Into a Splicer suit I went. A snazzy clothing suit torn to shreds, a savage looking baseball bat and even got a pistol for this game. The creme de la creme of basic monster jobs. I was so pleased that I sauntered right into my first zone.

Part of the job request that we keep the Big Daddies moving, to include occasionally attacking them when the adventurer is nearby. I would say that, that was the hardest part of the job. Dodging a giant brute with the intelligence of a sack of bricks and a heavily armed adventurer that just never seems to die. Hell's equivalent of being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Regardless, I did my job.

Between the mental pressure of being nearly seven thousand feet underwater and the constant screaming of eccentric bosses, doing my job was no easy task. Fighting between employees broke out frequently. More often than not, one managed to kill the other. With the adventurer creeping around to pick off the arguments survivors, ranks were thin at best.

It was late in the day when I saw one of the fights take a sour turn. A skeleton in the meat suit of a female splicer was screaming like a banshee at two male dressed skeletons. Just verbally tearing into those two. I took a good step or two back from this train wreck. About the time I found myself in the shadows, I saw the adventurer duck behind a sofa. The splicers caught up in the argument started to shoot at each other. It ended with the female dead and one male as well. The survivor went back to work of patrolling around, he suddenly found himself face to the muzzle of a modified shot gun. The shot was louder than I was used to, the tight quarters in this environment didn't help the sound.

As the adventurer stood there, going through what I assumed was a map check, the splicers body turned into a lock-box! If it wasn't for the splicer suit I wore, my jaw would have fallen to the floor. The adventurer started to move again and popped open the lock-box like it was entirely normal. What made me turn around and split was what came out of the box. A few bullets, small med kit and some money I would have understood. That is not what I saw. Two full clips of fifty caliber ammo, full medical kit, a fat wad of cash and three bottles of booze. The adventurer pulled the heart from the corpse and ate it! As if that wasn't bad enough, I still want to know, how does a single monster carry all of that on them and not use it? The ammo wasn't even for the weapon the splicer carried. Come to find out later, we were carrying items that we couldn't use but the adventurer had full access to. Thinking back now. . .I can't recall why I came back for the sequel. It wasn't any better.

TARGETING-

This has been a sore in my side since I started working in the gaming world. It has been in every job I have ever taken. It's also the biggest pile of bullshit I've ever come across. I just want to get this off my chest. Targeting for us monsters verses the targeting for the adventurers. It's bull.

If a skeleton is lucky, we're given bows or crossbows. Long distance weapons. Prime weapons considering we usually get short swords, a rotting shield. Hell, I met a skeleton who once was just give a chuck of a log and sent off on his way. Back to the bows and crossbows. Sometimes they work right, mostly they are just decoration and we hurl the arrows as best we can from our hands. Yeah, makes us a real threatening and scary bunch. Those of us who get the weapon in decent condition have a tendency to go a bit overboard.

I remember a guy, don't know his name so we'll call him Mikey. Mikey the idiot. So Mikey has a long bow, strung and a full quiver. That lucky prick. It was some generic dungeon crawl game and the adventurer had just broke into our area. I was backing up and firing at the adventurer, trying to pick my shots. Mikey? No, not Mikey. That guy was firing one after another, missing almost half of them, the others hitting the adventurer in the limbs. One though managed to land in the adventurers face. We both stop firing in excitement and expected the adventurer to fall over and die. Nope! Our luck that day decided that Mikey was just a hair off and this adventurer pulled out his own crossbow. He fired a stream of arrows at Mikey's legs. Mikey died! Survival rate for a shot to the face, one hundred percent. Shot in the leg. Death.

I still don't see how that was fair to us employees. We manage to decapitate or spear an adventurer in the head and they don't stop. There should have been screaming and yelling, but they are always unphased. They some much as thunk the air around us and we explode. The scales of justice are unbalanced.

NOW HIRING-

So here I am now. Standing in the unemployment line waiting on my turn. I got word from a buddy that a game call Dark Souls is giving us skeletons the credit and fair treatment we deserve. Frankly, I've been waiting years for this. Our time to really show our stuff as a monster. All I can hope is that they treat us right. Decent weapons and a proper environment to work in. I swear if I have to go around lighting candles again, I'm going straight to my union.


End file.
